"A Bitter Taste of Water" — Kapuściński's stories from his journeys to India, Afghanistan and Japan

Ryszard Kapuściński, Gorzki smak wody. Indie, Afganistan, Japonia, Chiny (“A Bitter Taste of Water. India, Afghanistan, Japan, China”), Oficyna Wydawnicza Kontynenty — PUBLISHED 23 OCTOBER.

“‘You are going to India.’ My first reaction was bewilderment. And immediately after it — panic: I know nothing about India,” Ryszard Kapuściński recalled in Travels with Herodotus.

It is a great pleasure to present Gorzki smak wody — the first book publication of Kapuściński’s stories from that journey to India and from those that followed, to Afghanistan and Japan, which he made in 1956–1957. The volume is enriched by previously unknown photographs he took in India, Japan and China.

This reportage was printed only once, in “Sztandar Młodych”, between 1956 and 1958. Kapuściński was twenty-four or twenty-five when he wrote it. But he was already a capable reporter, an attentive observer and simply a sensitive person, curious about the world and about people. The pieces in Gorzki smak wody are precisely constructed and written with verve and briskness. What stays with the reader for a long time are the descriptions of funeral rites in Benares, or the account of Sealdah Station in Calcutta, an enormous railway station crowded with refugees who had been circulating for years between Pakistan and India. These texts already show clearly the direction the mature Kapuściński’s work would take. And a conversation with a man who strangled a tiger with his own hands bears the mark of a future master’s pen.

The Afghan stories — Kapuściński ended up there by accident, having meant to return from India by ship, but the Suez Canal was blocked; his plane made a stopover in Kabul, where the reporter was… arrested for having no visa — are not only searching in their description of the local bureaucracy colliding with the local mentality, but also extremely funny.

In the Japanese texts we meet a mature Kapuściński, one with the ambition of looking under the lining of events, of coming to know a culture and its historical processes in depth, of setting them against a wider background and explaining them to the reader.

Tokyo was only a stop on Kapuściński’s way to China. From the Middle Kingdom, however, there are no stories at all — Kapuściński came back from there overwhelmed by the totalitarian order, and gave expression to that only later, in Travels with Herodotus. A few unique photographs survive in his archive, taken among other places on the Great Wall. In Gorzki smak wody we publish them for the first time.

Ryszard Kapuściński, Gorzki smak wody. Indie, Afganistan, Japonia, Chiny. First reportage from the great, far world, Oficyna Wydawnicza Kontynenty, published 23 October 2024.

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You can also listen to the podcast on Radio 357, in the series “Niewidzialne światy”.